The troubling world of paid work in the United States is wracked by important problems that require urgent attention. Low pay and the wretched position of the working poor, deregulation of industries and services and its impact on workplace relationships, bullying and violence at work, health and safety dangers in the modern office as well as the industrial plant, the intolerable pressures of work/family life balance in a longhours work culture, and, perhaps above all, the obstinate and widening inequalities in wages and conditions between employees— these are serious and practical issues affecting millions of Americans. These problems ought to trouble policymakers.But none of them are treated as mainstream political issues. The embattled labor movement does its best to publicize their salience, but, with union membership down to less than 8 percent among private-sector workers, it carries far less political clout than at any time since the 1920s (despite the fact that union members and their families are more likely to vote than any other group in the electorate). Politicians’ lack of interest in the world of paid work remains an obstinate reality. Lifestyle questions like abortion and gay marriage seem to arouse far more national attention than the sweatshop exploitation of immigrant workers or the incidence of gun violence in the workplace.A clutch of new books on contemporary American politics explains why there is so much neglect of what is being experienced by millions of the country’s workforce. In part, it is the consequence of a growing conservatism that has spread across the political spectrum since the early 1980s. In too much popular conservative mythology, the world of paid work remains wrongly synonymous with an organized labor movement characterized by aggressive and unreasonable unions, closed shops, disruptive picket lines, and the legacies of a bygone industrial age.
